First off I just want to get this out of the way. This is my way of writing an optimized post to be put on my money site. This is simply what has been working well for me, and if you disagree....awesome.

Research Your Keywords

Research your keywords always! What's the point in spending 20-30 minutes writing a quality post, if it isn't going to rank in the search engines? I usually choose two related keywords. I target one in the title, <h1> tag, and the content. The other will be within the content and in the <h2> tag. I personally choose keywords with exact searches between 300-500, but you can obviously shoot a little higher.

Keyword Density

Ok, don't flame me here guys, but my keyword density is between 2 and 3.5%. I will NEVER have a post with a density of over 4%. I personally feel that the big G is getting extremely strict on keyword stuffing.
Meta Tags

<h>

If you are a seasoned SEO, you know all about this. It's very important to have at least the <h1> and <h2> tags. I often go all the way down to <h7>, but it depends largely on the post. Your keywords should be used in all of these tags if possible, but at the very least in h1 and h2.

Description

Again, use the keywords in the description. This is great for SEO, but many descriptions I see in the search results don't do this. Big G will bold that keyword in the results, which will also help in making sure the user clicks on your post.

Keywords

This is pretty obvious, and I really don't have a clue how important it is, but I still do it, and will keep doing it until it hurts me.

Post Length

Here is where I got hurt in the latest G update. I had hundreds of posts that were 300-400 words. I lost significant rankings on my long tails because of this. I firmly believe that the length of a post is extremely important to SEO, and after I went through and added to my crappy short posts, I saw significant improvement in rankings over the next month.

So how long? I don't write a post under 800 words anymore. 800 words is the minimum, and often I will go well over 1000 (hence why I use so many header tags). Remember, big G is a content whore, and you know what matters to a whore......size.

Internal Linking

This is a whole other topic in itself, but I'll touch quickly on it. Internal linking is very important to SEO, and big G loves it, i.e Wikipedia. When you are writing your post, chances are you are going to mention something that you have mentioned before on your site. Whenever this happens, link to that post, ideally using your keywords as anchor text if possible. This will also help in lowering your bounce rate, meaning more pages viewed, meaning more possible revenue. Also if you are using analytics, I personally think google takes this into account when ranking your post, so the lower the better.

Hmmm....I think that's about it. Oh yeah, if you feel so inclined, link to an outside authority site in your post. I usually only do this on my home page, but if it applies, it's a good practice to get into. G likes when you play nice with others.

Again, I know for some of you this is like explaining how to eat, but I just hope some of the new guys to SEO can benefit.

It's all nonsense sorry. Density is irrelevant and different for all sites competing for the various terms, no set percentage not now not ever.

Remove the h1 tag from your page and watch your site stay where it is or possibly increase. The h1 tag has been over analysed now in seo, if you were a google search quality engineer you would turn the value down and they have. If your page is over optimised then it is possibly a good idea to change the h1 to h2.

Using keywords in the description is not great for seo. But you need to put some keywords in there to stop google changing your snippet to some onpage content.

The only thing right in your whole post is google likes internal linking, but again, don't go over the top because they don't like over optimisation.

This is a bad place to come for seo advice. It is ok to come and learn about link building tools etc but in general very poor advice is given here.

There is none.

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Do you work for Google? If not your advice is just an opinion, just as the OP's is and I take both views with a pinch of salt. No one knows and never will. It's just pure speculation. As soon as you think you know, Google have made another change.

People, just write good unique content and get lots of varying backlinks. simple really

It's all nonsense sorry. Density is irrelevant and different for all sites competing for the various terms, no set percentage not now not ever.

Remove the h1 tag from your page and watch your site stay where it is or possibly increase. The h1 tag has been over analysed now in seo, if you were a google search quality engineer you would turn the value down and they have. If your page is over optimised then it is possibly a good idea to change the h1 to h2.

Using keywords in the description is not great for seo. But you need to put some keywords in there to stop google changing your snippet to some onpage content.

The only thing right in your whole post is google likes internal linking, but again, don't go over the top because they don't like over optimisation.

Click to expand...

Really? So you can just write whatever you want and it will rank? I'll try that next time.

I must agree with the people telling that the bigger articles tend to get a high rank.
For example: i used to have a site with gadget reviews..

Whenever I posted articles of 300 words or less, they barely got any visitors. Moreover, the rankings were very bad.

On the other hand, when I started to post 600 plus words articles, the rankings improved, and the bounce rate decreased seriously. As for the rankings, for some keywords, I was just under engdadget, fact that really tells a lot about the power of content, considering that for that site, I've never made any link building campaign.

Though, my question is this: what do you do with the news, when you can barely write 200-300 words?

This is like the most basic stuff you would learn on your first day in "SEO school" and it hasn't changed in the past 10 years.

I don't see that this has anything to do with the Panda update at all.

PS* The stuff about the H tag and the keyword density isn't really true anymore. You don't even need H tags, but one is pretty good.

Keyword density really means nothing to Google. All they need to know is what your page is about. Place the keyword about 1-3 times on the page and once in the page title and Google knows exactly what it is about. Anchor text from backlinks also indicates this to Google.

Larger articles work for me. I have never bothered with anything under 500 words and most articles are 600+. Funny thing I have noticed recently one of my larger sites has one main competitor and we dook it out for major and minor keywords. The difference is his site has over 55k articles (yes you heard me right). Where as mine has about 400. Guess what, this latest panda update has pushed his site to page 2. Page 1 is all mine baby on nearly all terms we were fighting it out for. I am wondering if his site has been relegated as a content farm?

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